Everybody knows that marketing is very important if you want your business to grow and keep up in this competitive environment. Many small businesses are suffering and feel that they can’t afford marketing for their company. And this is where I disagree with them, because there are ways that you can market your business without spending money. But if you can’t afford to hire marketing experts for your company, than you need to sacrifice some of your time and you need to understand that your company wont thrive until you put some work into advertising your business.

There are many ways that you can make your business more visible for free and it is on the Internet! Yes, there are many free directories where you can submit your business information, add your business on Google Places (which I’ve talked about in my previous Blog), you can create simple videos and add them on video sites and finally you can also start with Article Marketing, which I will talk about now.

Article Marketing is a great type of advertising and it doesn’t have to cost your business money. If you have some spare time to write a short article on your expertise you can publish it online for free! There are companies that provide such services, as article creation and distribution to your Blog and article directories; but if you can find time it doesn’t have to cost you anything other that a bit of your time.

Once you create your articles you can publish them online and add links to your website. So when somebody reads your article they might follow the link that you put in it, which means traffic to your website. If the article contains good information, people will pass it on to their friends and share it on social websites, which means more visibility to you and more back links to your website. So as you see Article Marketing is a great tool for link building and a way of representing yourself as an expert of that industry, which in the long run can build trust and increase new leads.

If you don’t have money to spare for a proper Blog creation (meaning buying a domain name and having a separate site for blogging) there are free choices that you can avail of. For example, Google lets you set up your own free Blog on www.blogger.com. It’s a simple Blog, easy to use and it’s free! Another popular Blog would be Word Press, where they also allow you to set up your own Blog for free.

Now if you want your article marketing to be successful, you should produce good quality articles at least once a week and no shorter than 400 words. You might think why 400 words? Well one of the major article submission sites require your article to be minimum of 400 words, which is Ezine Articles. If you start writing articles make sure to start uploading them on www.ezinearticles.com. They are one of the strictest article directory sites, they proofread your article and check on the internet if it is original. If they will find that some of the content in your article is copied from another site your article will not be published and you might be not able to publish further posts. So I would recommend publishing your articles on Ezine first and then publishing them on the other article directory sites, which I listed a few below.

To submit articles on Ezine you will need to become a member. Ezine does not allow any links in the body text, but you can put 2 links into the Author Box, which appears at the end of the page when you’re submitting an article, and you can also embed a URL in your text there.

So make sure you produce good quality articles weekly, minimum of 400 words, distribute them widely (with added links to your website) along with some other advertising advice that was given above and see how that will help your business!

Here are a few article directory sites that you can submit your articles too:

Ezine Articles.com http://www.ezinearticles.com
GoArticles http://www.goarticles.com
Web Pro News http://www.webpronews.com
Site Reference http://site-reference.com
AD http://www.articledashboard.com
Free Articles http://www.topica.com/lists/free_articles
Articles Base Directory http://www.articlesbase.com
Articles.Web.Com http://www.articles.web.com
Gobala Krishnan http://articles.easywordpress.com
DirectoryGold Article Directory http://articles.directorygold.com
Afro Articles – Article
Marketing Directory http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard/
InfoWizards Free Content Articles http://content.infowizards.com
Article Friendly http://www.articlefriendly.com
Article Submission http://www.articlewheel.com/
Top-Affiliate.com http://www.top-affiliate.com/articles
Free Articles for Reprint http://www.articles-hub.com

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